In
my article -
Decloaking
hidden segments in the enterprise for rackmount SSDs - I mentioned that
there are some markets in which a simple, low cost, efficiently designed, high
capacity, white box style of rackmount SSD is now regarded as the lowest level
component for integration - in a similar way to which others might view an SSD
drive or a server.

I think that if HGST avoids the temptation of
adding too many software frills to the Skyera boxes - which would make them less
attractive for embedded integrators - then they could form the basis of an
attractive 1U high capacity SSD building block which could become a multi
billion dollar product line.

A
year ago (in August 2013) a reader asked me about the significance of
Skyera's high ranking in our SSD reader searches in the light of what he
referred to as "Skyer having lots of ideas but not many sales."

Generally
I referred him to the proven past successes of the 7 year running
Top SSD Companies Lists
as a sensitive and early indicator of future business success or failure - an
issue which I discussed with noteworthy historic examples in the
24th quarterly edition
(published April 2013).

Specifically - re his question - as to why so
many of our readers might be interested in learning more about Skyera I said -"Nearly
everyone in the enterprise systems business I talk to (CEOs , CTOs etc) agrees
that Skyera will be the company that sets the agenda for the price of
enterprise SSD racks for the next 3-4 years. Everyone else either has to
figure out a way to beat them in niche segments or avoid competing with them
altogether."

In
August 2013
- Skyeraannounced
that it will introduce
PCIe connectivity (to
the existing FC and
iSCSI) as well as
replication in the next version of its
rackmount SSDs -
the skyEagle - which will ship in the first half of 2014 - offering 500TB
uncompressed (2.5TB deduped and compressed) in a 1U form factor at a record
breaking list price
expected to be under $2,000 per uncompressed terabyte.

Editor's
comments:- last week I spoke to Skyera's founder and CEO Rado Danilak
and some key people in his team - which in addition to core members of the team
who designed some of the early
SandForce controllers -
also includes talented and experienced
people from other well
known chip and enterprise storage companies.

Skyera make a big thing
about their cost value proposition.

They deliver fast SSD storage
at a system list price under $3 / GB (uncompressed) and about $1 / GB (with
compression and dedupe). That not only beats best of breed SSD systems but
seriously challenges HDD based storage too.

In any given year in the SSD market
there are maybe 2 or 3 industry changing announcements - which illustrate what
the shape of the future could be.

Skyera's Skyhawk is one of those
in the year we're already in. And would be just as significant if the launch
had been delayed into next year too.

Here's some more stuff I learned
from talking to Skyera.

Funding

Rado said Skyera has
one strategic investor - which he didn't want to name right now. The company is
mostly owned by its management. That gives them an incentive to design a product
which can make money as soon as possible.

FPGA rather than ASIC -
for Skyera's hardware controller

The FPGA versus ASIC tradeoff
debate in electronic design goes back to the mid 1980s. With FPGA you buy a
chip that's got arrays of logic and common functions already in it. You
define what your FPGA does by programming the interconnections in a way
that's similar to writing to flash. With ASIC you have almost total freedom to
decide what functions your chip does - but the chips are made in a factory
that's making a lot of other chips - not just yours. You're buying time in
someone else's multi-billion dollar factory. There are set up fees, learning
curves and queues involved.

In a rack system - the recurring unit cost
is not a big deal - whereas it is a
cost disadvantage
in a single small drive - which is why
STEC made much of
switching to ASICs in its enterprise SSDs last year. Where the VC factor comes
back into the equation is that each design costs hundreds of thousands of
dollars - and months of delay. So if you have the realistic choice of either
FPGA or ASIC in the form factor and power budget - which is not an option if
you're designing a 1 inch
embedded SSD for example - then the FPGA route means you can ship products
sooner with less initial outlay and your revenue stream can contribute to
earning profits faster.

Having said that - my guess is that after
their launch - if Skyera said they needed another $500 million or so to do
something - like remodel the executive car park - VCs would rush in to supply
the cars too. But Skyera probably doesn't need that much money.

Core
SSD technologies

On the SSD architecture side I've already written
about the strategic importance of large architecture, adaptive DSP, SSD
software, tradeoffs
between flash capacity and reliability and performance and the benefits of
integrating them at a high level. So I won't repeat those points here.

Rado
said he wanted to get the best performance and reliability possible out of "cheap
crappy flash". He said if you use a traditional
RAID 6 array - then the
latencies start to mount up - and you end up doing 3 writes cycles to get the
parity protection. That's bad for endurance and bad for latency too. He said
that Skyera's way of doing RAID-like protection means that the write
amplification for a 4kB write is an average of only a factor of x1.04.
That's a 3x reduction on write amplification compared to arrays of
2.5" SSDs for
example. There are many different levels in the hardware and software - where
the self knowledge about the system is used to good advantage.

Their
controller technology can be adapted to work with any flash. In theory they
could populate production systems with the cheapest flash they can get and
even mix up the sources in the same SSD and still get a working system.
Nevertheless the company's deep knowledge of flash - means that (in my words)
there's little risk of cooking the memory cells to get the performance. And they
know which suppliers are better.

Earlier this year
DensBits explained
to me how using adaptive DSP meant that you could get 60% faster write
performance out of MLC flash because the DSP gave you the data integrity when
using shorter write pulses and lower energy - which also leads to better
endurance.
(See endurance
multiplication wars.)

Anyway Rado explained - that once they
decided that they had to design a proprietary memory array - they knew they
also had to invest in the software layers to make it work within the enterprise
infrastructure.

Internally their box is like an array of memory
connected to a switch. In that respect - it's similar to the RamSan systems from
TMS.

High
availability

Skyera's initial system isn't a
true high
availability SSD - and although it has many essential enterprise features -
this will limit the appeal of the product in some applications. Nevertheless, I
know that many super users of SSDs would prefer to use their own cloud like
wraparound software - and all they need is a low cost scalable rack which they
can use as a component to build multi-petabyte SSDs.

Skyera said they
see traditional enterprise SSD apps like analytics being a good fit for the
launch system.

HA is in the product roadmap and has hooks in the system
architecture. It will come later.

Business development

I
suggested to Skyera - that given how
popular their
company had been with SSD readers while they were still in stealth mode - the
problem they might have after this product launch would be too many inquiries.
That would place a burden on marketing to filter out the type of SSD leads
which were a good fit and those which were just curiosity.

Maybe we can
recycle the leads we don't want and sell them to other SSD companies - said
Skyera.

The SSD market will be watching Skyera with interest to see
if stacking all these new technologies together for the first time in a
system really works.

But unlike those 2 companies - Skyera
is using (in Rado's words) "cheap crappy flash" - which it brings into
line with many integrated design techniques - including
adpative DSP
write management (similar to
SMART,
STEC and
DensBits.

But its
proprietary - rather
than open (array oif COTS SSDs) approach will limit the company's initial
uptake with more conservatively minded users - who would prefer to see an array
of SAS or
PCIe SSD modules
inside a rack.

However, the low latency which is achieved by using a
proprietary array design and the efficiencies (in cost and reliability) which
accrue from integrating many leading edge SSD design techniques concurrently in
a reinforcing manner within a single rack system - are just not possible using
so called "open" designs.

As with any new generation of
SSD controller - which
pushes the boundaries of what you can do with cheap memory - there are risks -
because the product reliability and life cycle and
endurance
model is based on extrapolated predictions and models - and isn't yet market
proven.

That should bring some comfort to Skyera's competitors in
the rackmount SSD market in the next few quarters.

The
beginnning of the SSD search is a different place for everyone. Just as every
day someone is hearing the music of the
Beatles for the very first time
- so too do some old classic SSD articles and themes seem to endure.

But
if I had to suggest just 3 SSD articles - depending on who you are - it would
be these.

where are we
now with SSD software? - and how did we ever get into this mess? In the next
few years the software for SSDs will have as much impact as hardware
architecture did earlier. Don't expect this to be an orderly top-down process.

if you're new to the SSD market

the SSD Buyers Guide - will take you to groups of
articles and directories which are organized by technology and market theme.

the Top 20 SSD
Companies - whatever your interest in SSDs - these are the companies which
are attracting the most interest amongst your peers.

Editor's
comments:- This is a momentous acquisition for the enterprise SSD market.

I think the context in which to view this is as the embodiment of a new
wisdom in the industry - that to succeed in the enterprise SSD market today -
and to achieve the ultimate efficiencies at the manufacturing level - vendors
have to think like systems companies.

And some of the biggest
systems opportunities for efficient vendors nowadays - in which efficiencies
translate into business opportunities are in hyperscale systems and internet
infrastructure.

I've been discussing these trends in the past 18
months or so in these articles - which I think are relevant to today's
acquisition announcement.

new
directions in rackmount SSDs (May 24, 2013) - "One of the most
potentially rewarding market challenges which SSD companies are grappling with
right now is - how to make enterprise solid state storage attractive to users
who aren't worried about their hard drive performance and don't even think they
need SSDs... New SSD thinking inside the box will lead to better enterprise
flash arrays."

meet Ken -
and the enterprise SSD software event horizon (October 8, 2013) - "Why
it's so easy to fall into a trap when answering these questions... How big will
the SSD market will be when SSDs replace hard drives? When will it happen? and
What will be the revenue of the SSD market at that time?"

Seagate to
acquire LSI's flash business (May 29, 2014 ) - "...even if Seagate
focused only on the high volume potential of existing cloud infrastructure
customers and big web entities (like Google and Baidu) - who need value based
enterprise SSDs - but who are perfectly capable of designing their own software
and APIs and firmware tweaks - then Seagate could... establish it as one of
(several) leaders in the utility SSD segment of the cloud."

You can feel the Post
Modernist Era of SSD in the air everywhere. Momentum has been building with
signals coming from the appearance of memory channel SSDs, talk of in-situ SSD
processing, and much practical rethinking about RAM architecture.

If you're still struggling
with imagining how MLC differs from SLC and eMLC, and how endurance, adaptive
writes and all those electrons (locked in leaky cells) relate to each other -
listen to this talking heads SSD video - history of flash memory and
storage

Main
speaker is Frankie Roohparvar, COO - Skyera - who's been in the
non volatile memory business for 30 years and has over 480 patents.

"Even if you had all
your perfectly baked enterprise SSD cake - with all the software trimmings -
which are still a year or so in the future - available right now in your
restaurant and offered it to these people at that futuristically low price today
- they wouldn't want to taste it" - I said to Skyera's CEO
Rado Danilak.

"They prefer other people to experiment with the new enterprise SSD chef in
town. You just have to live with that.

"But in another few years these same cautious types may be saying
to everyone they know - don't you just love dining at Skyera?"

Editor:- August 13, 2013 - Skyera today
announced
that. among other things, it will introduce
PCIe connectivity (to
the existing FC and
iSCSI) as well as
replication in the next version of its
rackmount SSDs -
the skyEagle - which will ship in the first half of 2014 - offering 500TB
uncompressed (2.5TB deduped and compressed) in a 1U form factor at a record
breaking list price
expected to be under $2,000 per uncompressed terabyte.

Editor's
comments:- not a lot of people remember this - but 6 years ago- in
August 2007 -
when Violin emerged from
stealth mode with one of the
fastest rackmount
SSDs of that era - Violin's 1010
was also the first well known enterprise SSD which offered PCIe as the
primary connection option. (This was the month before
Fusion-io launched
its first ioDrive and began its multi-year mission to re-educate and change the
way that the enterprise market viewed SSDs BTW.)

But in
2007 the
enterprise market was still grappling with the idea of rackmount SSDs - and for
those buying - their connection of choice was
FC SAN. That meant
Violin's initial product made a market impression - but the company had to
wait for its later systems - redesigned with FC and flash - to get the sales
which would secure its future as the new leader in the rackmount SSD market
(replacing Texas Memory
Systems). Violin's early experience with PCIe being the wrong interface for
its rackmount market left scars in the company's psyche. So it wasn't till
nearly 6 years after that Violin entered the (now) safely conventional market
for module and card based PCIe SSDs.

Today in the market of August
2013 - PCIe has evolved into a very different technology and market
proposition for enterprise SSDs.

As a technology (it can be used as a fabric to interconnect fast racks - a
bit like InfiniBand
in some respects - except that the ecosystem of compatible SSDs is much richer
and price competitive).

So
I view the 96 lanes of PCIe connectivity - in Skyera's forthcoming skyEagle -
as a way of reaching out to an entirely new market. This PCIe option provides a
simple and cheap foundation for clustering boxes in
high availability
configurations.

Skyera is going to beat that timescale by 2 years. Which incidentally means
that all the other predicted dates about the consequences for
hard drives in an
enterprise SSD world - are also 1 or 2 years earlier than anyone previously
imagined too.

When you're asking what's possible
from combining controller
technologies (like
adaptive R/W)
with software efficiencies
(don't do things which are unnecessary to access the true app data - as opposed
to emulating every just-in-case-we-need-it lookahead or spurious
hard drive traffic
request) the 100x figure is a useful competitive metric and shows what
you can integrating array level system software with already optimized drives.

"Although few
people on this planet really understand the complex mix of technologies which
Skyera has mastered to architect one of the world's most efficiently
engineered SSD arrays - almost anyone can easily appreciate the results when
they're presented with the resulting price and performance."